Our Wives Under the Sea (47)

LEAH


Matteo in his circle of torches on the main deck, blinking toward the windows. I came in from the rear chamber, wanting to ask how long he had let me sleep and aware it would be pointless to do so. He didn’t acknowledge my presence, barely moving when I opened my mouth to speak.

“I could make you some coffee,” I said, when several moments had passed and neither of us had said anything. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure how long it had been since I’d last spoken. Since Jelka, Matteo’s and my cohabitation had receded to something empty, quiet for the most part. We moved around each other, gave each other a wide berth, as if still trying to factor Jelka into the space she had vacated. Sometimes, when I was in my bunk, I would slit one eye open and watch him without knowing why.

“You shouldn’t keep sitting like that,” I said when he didn’t respond, gesturing to his crossed legs, the awkward hump of his back and neck. “Bad for your posture.”

I don’t know why I said this, really. All of us (both of us, I should say) had been cooped up so long that it seemed impossible to imagine our bodies looking the same as they had done on first immersion. Cramped living conditions, cramped bunks, air that was only rendered breathable by a trick of machinery. Sometimes I would catch my reflection in the windows and imagine I saw myself concertinaed by pressure, bent double, distorted out of any recognizable shape. This image would usually correct itself on second inspection, though not always. Lately, in fact, it was getting harder to see myself without the trace of something fundamentally unpleasant sketched over the top.

Matteo still wasn’t responding to me, though he briefly leaned over as if to correct the alignment of one of the torches, then seemed to think better of it. I experienced an impulse to kick out at the torch nearest to me, sweeping a hole through the charm he imagined the circle cast, though I didn’t do this.

“I should probably make something to eat,” I tried again, when Matteo still chose to say nothing. I looked at the side of his face, the impassive expression, and felt briefly overwhelmed by rage. I’m not sure what this feeling was about, exactly, whether it was purely to do with Matteo ignoring me or rather a little of everything: the dark, the blank, the impossibility, the sheer pointlessness of everything we had so far been forced to endure. I looked toward the window, caught the bent, unhappy line of the thing that seemed to be my reflection and then closed my eyes quickly, thought about Miri instead. I wanted, as it suddenly occurred to me, to be hugged more desperately than I had possibly ever wanted it. I wanted to fit my head into the crook of her neck and feel her move her fingers through my hair.

“How will we ever explain this,” I said, after another long moment. I meant Jelka, I suppose, but perhaps again I also meant a little of everything. I tried to picture explaining all that had happened to Miri, of taking out all the small observations I’d stored up for her and laying them down in a line, but when I did so the scene wouldn’t run correctly. The imaginary me opened her mouth and produced only a strange, whaling ocean sound and the imaginary Miri couldn’t be made to understand.

It was at this point that Matteo hung his head, his first movement that seemed to indicate that he had heard me speaking. He didn’t say anything, though his shoulders moved a little, and after a long minute he moved to one side, gesturing for me to step inside his circle of torches. I came and sat beside him, our sides not quite touching, and we stayed like that for a long time before getting up again and going on as we had before. It was quiet—no sound and no voice within that sound, as though something were taking a breath. Time passed, I’m not sure how much of it, and for a long time nothing happened.





MIRI


The night is cold, white lights, a curve of moon like a finger crooked into a claw. On Tuesday, Leah started losing motion in one of her legs and now the other appears to be defeating her. The strange transparency of her skin is intermittent; I will look at her and see more than halfway through her and then nothing again, almost as normal. The opal sheen of her is recurrent but not consistent; her skin seems to flex between states, first skin and then abalone and then water and back again.

I understand that she needs more salt, but I’m running low and I don’t want to leave her. I put my hand to her face, the place where her eye once was. I try to take her hand and experience the distinct impression that if I squeeze it, it will melt away into the water. There is a softness that wasn’t there before, the sense of a semiporous membrane in place of what was once a solid scaffolding of muscle and skin.

It is after midnight when her breathing becomes bad enough that I am seized with a sudden mania for changing the bathwater. She has been lying in it for so long that there is a scum of dust over the surface and the salt is collecting across the upper planes of her body. I try to pull her from the water, although when I do so, her face is not as I remember it. She has been beneath the surface for days now and the shape of her expression without the distortion of water above her is something I am not prepared for, to the extent that I almost drop her back. It is hard to explain, the way I see her in the moment before she starts to gasp and protest at the air and her extraction from the water. The way her features sit in her face seems uncertain, as though they have been placed there only delicately and might at any point leak sideways, like ice melting off a curving surface. In the second before I drop her, I half expect her to sluice through my fingers. She goes down again—a sharp splash, water slopping forward over the edge of the bathtub and soaking my feet—drops back, her eye on me, her long-drenched bandage slipping sideways, and I realize as I watch her sink that I cannot keep her here.